AOL's Book Maven

NB: The Book Maven has been writing her journal for a few months, but due to technical circumstances, was not able to promote it beyond a select circle. Now that it can be opened for public viewing, she's decided to bring out a few older entries to get the blog rolling...

Just before Joe Queenan wrote ''The Know-It-All': A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing" in last October's New York Times Book Review, had someone sprinkled arsenic on his Cheerios? With his review subtitled "The Ivy League may not want to claim this author as one of their own" and snarky comments like "Flaubert is famous for coining the term ''le mot juste''; le mot juste here is ''jackass,''  Queenan pens less a book review than an ad hominem attack.

Full disclosure: not only do I know A.J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, but I attended his book party last fall, too. (If you ask me--and no one did, I admit it--anyone who manages to get a major house  to throw a great party in these financially troubled times for the book industry deserves to be in the running for smartest person in publishing.) However, I come not to praise Jacobs, but to un-bury his book from the deep grave Queenan dug for it: "Some time ago, A. J. Jacobs, a senior editor at Esquire, set out to become the smartest man in the world, an ambition that meshed poorly with his skills set." Come now, Mr. Queenan, was that necessary? Or even accurately shot?

The whole point of Jacobs' book, you see, from the perspective not just of this reader but of others to whom she has spoken (none of whom know Jacobs personally), was to point up the irony in that very fact. Jacobs understands very well that he is not the smartest person in the world. Not only would the smartest person in the world not embark on this quest in the first place--it's doubtful such a person would ever have worked at Entertainment Weekly. (Just kidding, A.J.!)

Seriously--who ever said that a book about intellectual curiosity had to be intellectually rigorous? Says Queenan, that's who. He writes: "''The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World'' is mesmerizingly uninformative. But this is hardly surprising, because the premise of the book is completely wrong. The animating idea of this misguided endeavor is that corralling a vast array of unrelated facts will, in and of itself, make a person more interesting. This is idiotic. Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact, because a poorly educated person does not know which facts are important."

Actually, the premise that is wrong is Queenan's: who ever said that Jacobs bought into what was from the get-go a comedic premise?

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• #1 Comment from cgarstang 
  2/13/05 6:26 PM | Permalink

  You must have enjoyed Jacobs' piece in today's NYT Book Review!